The first UGA Student Employee of the Year award was handed out April 10 at a special reception honoring nominated students. Supervisors in about five hundred UGA departments nominated one student employee for the award. The UGA Career Center staff narrowed the list to the top 103, who were invited to attend the reception. The career center chose these honored nominees based on letters of nomination that included statements about the student’s reliability, quality of work, initiative, professionalism and any unique contributions they made to their department.

The Libraries are proud to have four of our own students among those honored.
Lora Bergstrom, a junior from Watkinsville, was nominated by her supervisor in the Science Library Reference Unit. She’s been working for the department since June 2004. Her major is Journalism with minors in Religion and Child and Family Development. According to her supervisor, “Lora is the person everyone wants to work with on a project. For Lora it does not matter how mundane or complex a task is, she will always give it her all.”
Edward Stephens, a senior from Atlanta, works for the Gifts department in the Main Library. He’s a senior in English, graduating at the end of this semester. He has just interviewed with Teach For America, and hopes to get assigned a teaching position for next year. And for fun, he’s a senior member and champion on the UGA Ultimate Frisbee team.
Zachary Smola, from the Digital Library of Georgia, has worked on many projects for the DLG including “For Our Mutual Benefit: The Athens Woman’s Club and Social Reform, 1912-1920” and “Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps“. He is a senior English major from Tyrone, GA. His supervisor raves, “Zachary’s diligence and high rate of accuracy enabled us to finish the Sanborn data entry ahead of the deadline. Long term projects requiring tedious proofreading never faze him. He accepts all assignments with good humor and a positive attitude. We will be unhappy to lose Zachary when he graduates this year, as he is a valued member of our team, uplifting all of us with his sense of humor and professionalism.”
Brian Shaw, working in Government Documents, is a senior from Lawrenceville, majoring in Business and Spanish. He’s been with the department since February 2006. Brian has studied abroad in Spain and last year went on the performance tour in China with the Redcoat Band. His supervisor lauds him, mentioning four major projects, involving upwards of 11,500 records in our GIL catalog, that Brian completed in five months time. She adds, “He also completed a project which had been ongoing for well over a year before he joined us, and which was less than 40% complete when he began. Within six months, Brian had completed the project with unmatched efficiency and accuracy.”